restaurants

I shook my head. “No, I’m good – I do it all the time,” I answered brightly. I leaned in closer, examining my target carefully as I adjusted the white balance on my camera. Holding my cell phone light in one hand and my camera in the other, I zoomed in on the shrimp-topped squid ink pasta noodles and carefully snapped my first shot. And then a second. And then another from a different angle. Finally, after several more shots, I set my camera down next to my wine glass and looked up with a smile.

Do you use a service like Yelp to check out a new restaurant before visiting? Do you read other people’s reviews and maybe even leave your own? Most of us do (at least the former), but if you’re interested in the sources of the food the restaurant serves, you may be out of luck. Unless it’s one of those relatively rare places that promotes its use of locally-sourced ingredients, or even lists the farms from which it buys, you either have to ask a lot of questions or take your chances…

The Art of the Menu is a new blog from the people at one of my favorite design websites, Under Consideration. Collecting and highlighting interesting and unique menus from restaurants around the country with a succinct review on the sidebar, it’s like “MenuPages.com” for foodies and design snobs. Now, if restaurants could only fix their obsession with Flash and PDF menus on their horrible websites (hat tip @MichaelSurtees for this observation).

Here’s a menu for a Thanksgiving prix fixe dinner in 1899 at Sturtevant House, which apparently was a popular hotel located on Broadway and 29th Street. It closed its doors around 1903. Look at all that food people could get in olden times for just 75 cents. Relatedly, New York Magazine has a round up…

In the New York Times blog “You’re the Boss: The Art of Running a Small Business,” Bruce Buschel lists 100 things servers should never do in restaurants (part 1 and part 2). It’s actually astonishing how many times I’ve encountered these rules broken, but my two biggest personal biggest pet peeves at any dining establishment…